This may not count as "modern", but its a good story along the vein you are looking for ...

In July of 1610 Galileo was still making discoveries faster than he
could publish descriptions of them. On the 25th he discovered that
Saturn was apparently situated between two smaller companions that
always moved together. Wanting to establish his priority of discovery,
but not yet ready to reveal what he had found, he sent to Kepler (and
others) the following jumble of letters, which he informed them was a
coded description of his latest discovery:

smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras

Encoding dicoveries that weren't quite ready for prime-time like this was apparently a common technique back then.

Returning to Kepler and his struggle with the mysterious coded
message, it so happens that after a great deal of effort he actually
succeeded in making sense out of Galileo's jumbled string of
character:

Salve umbistineum geminatum Martia proles.

which means "Be greeted, double knob, children of Mars."
In other words, Kepler deduced that Galileo had in fact discovered two moons of
Mars...

Kepler had already deduced Mars might have two moons, as Earth had one and Jupiter had four, so two would fit in the geometic progression. (Hey, it was the 1600's. Give the guy a break.) I suspect this is what he wanted it to say, so he found a way to make the anagram say that.

For years everyone just went around incorrectly thinking these scientists had established that Mars had two moons. People like Voltaire and Swift even wrote about them. Then about 250 years later, somebody with a far more powerful telescope looked at Mars and discovered that it had...wait for it...two moons!

It seems to have been a sandbar which appeared in the 1970s but was washed away at a later date. The surprising thing is that although it has been subject to a major boundary dispute and although the surrounding Sundarbans mangrove forest has a population of several million, its appearance was first reported several years later by satellite and its disappearance first reported by a climate change researcher an unknown time after it stopped existing.